With so much news about social media in Australia right now, I thought I’d wrap up the winter series by speaking with Professor Axel Bruns from the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology.
In this episode we discuss whether anything can replace what was Twitter, Australia’s News Media Bargaining Code and Meta refusing to pay for news content, age restrictions for social media, the arrest of Telegram’s CEO Pavel Durov, and why filter bubbles really aren’t a thing.
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Episode Links
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Prof. Axel Bruns is an Australian Laureate Fellow and Professor in the Digital Media Research Centre at Queensland University of Technology in Brisbane, Australia, and a Chief Investigator in the ARC Centre of Excellence for Automated Decision-Making and Society.
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[11 August 2024] A survey of more than 2,500 people conducted by News Corp’s Let Them Be Kids campaign shows 70 per cent want the age limit on social media to be raised from 13 to at least 16. 85 per cent believe platforms like Meta should be held responsible for preventing harmful or misleading content from being shared. 96 per cent of respondents say social media companies need to do more to operate within Australia.
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Key Insights: Double the number of people (42%) see AI as more of a risk over those who see it as more of an opportunity (21%); 69% support increasing the age limit on social media platforms from 13 to 16 years old; 62% support making hate speech a criminal offence.
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[5 June 2024] A legal battle to have graphic footage of a church stabbing in Sydney removed from Elon Musk's social media platform X will be abandoned by the eSafety commissioner. Commissioner Julie Inman Grant confirmed the Federal Court case would be abandoned, after several blows in court and an attempt to temporarily force the footage to be hidden expiring.
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[5 June 2024] Regulator will now focus on tribunal case launched by Elon Musk’s social media platform which is seeking a review of decision to order removal of tweets.
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Blue Murder is a two-part Australian television crime drama miniseries produced by the Australian Broadcasting Corporation in 1995, and is based on true events.
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[9 May 2024] Musk’s company X, formerly known as Twitter, this week launched a case in the Administrative Appeals Tribunal testing the merits of eSafety Commissioner Julie Inman Grant’s order to remove videos of the April stabbing of a Sydney priest.
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[27 August 2024] Telegram app CEO Pavel Durov is in custody after French authorities investigated alleged criminal activities on the messaging platform.
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[26 August 2024] A case was opened last month to investigate child pornography, drug sales, fraud and other criminal activities on the platform. The app’s founder, Pavel Durov, was detained over the weekend near Paris.
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[22 August 2024] In addition to Combs and Dorsey, the other nearly 100 X Holdings Corp. shareholders listed include: venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz, Saudi Prince Alwaleed bin Talal al Saud; UnipolSai S.P.A., an Italian financial services company based in Bologna; and 8VC, a venture capital firm co-founded by Joe Lonsdale, co-founder of software company Palantir, according to an unsealed court document obtained by the Washington Post.
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[29 August 2024] The first preliminary charge against him was for ''complicity in managing an online platform to allow illicit transactions by an organised group,'' a crime that can lead to sentences of up to 10 years in prison and 500,000 euro fine, the prosecutor's office said.
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[26 August 2024] Pavel Durov’s arrest over the weekend was shocking. It was also inevitable.
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[26 August 2024] Conservatives have spent months championing Telegram as an app that more closely aligns with their values than Signal.
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Axel Bruns argues that the influence of echo chambers and filter bubbles has been severely overstated, and results from a broader moral panic about the role of online and social media in society.
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[21 August 2024] After an often-heated parliamentary sitting, new figures show spike in ejections of opposition members as Kylea Tink labels behaviour ‘unacceptable’
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[21 August 2024] Albanese government unveils proposal which could see MP’s salary docked by more than $11,000 for misconduct.
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[13 June 2024] Nearly 900 complaints have been made about the National Anti-Corruption Commission's decision to not launch a fresh investigation into the robodebt scandal. The Inspector of the National Anti-Corruption Commission will start its own inquiry into that decision, given many of those complaints allege corrupt conduct or maladministration by the NACC itself.
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[8 March 2024] Facebook parent company is refusing to pay for news content in Australia.
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The News Media Bargaining Code (NMBC, or News Media and Digital Platforms Mandatory Bargaining Code) is a law designed to have large technology platforms that operate in Australia pay local news publishers for the news content made available or linked on their platforms.
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[29 August 2024] Media giants like Nine Entertainment, Seven West Media and News Corp Australia have been rolling out redundancies over the last few months, which are attributed to Meta axing news from its platform, first announced back in March.
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[6 July 2024] The news industry chose to give its product away for free when it began to publish its news online in the mid-90s; as a result, audiences now expect news to be free and are unwilling to start paying for it again. The fact that advertising revenue is going mostly to the major platforms simply reflects the fact that these general-purpose platforms have much larger user bases than news outlets (which are of interest only to a fraction of Web users). No surprise there. Of course they're more interesting to advertisers than news sites; whatever the news industry keeps claiming, social media didn't somehow siphon away advertising revenue from their sites. That advertising money was never going to news sites in the first place.
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[19 December 2023] A bill that mandates tech giants pay news outlets for their content has come into effect in Canada amid an ongoing dispute with Facebook and Instagram owner Meta over the law.
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[25 August 2024] Google is trying to reduce what it spends on commercial deals with some smaller digital news publishers, amid growing calls for a levy on technology giants to fund journalism after Meta walked away from the News Media Bargaining Code.
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The Joint Select Committee on Social Media and Australian Society for the 47th Parliament was appointed by resolution of the Senate on 15 May 2024 and resolution of the House of Representatives on 16 May 2024. The committee is due to present an interim report on or before 15 August 2024, and is final report on or before 18 November 2024.
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[30 August 2024] While levies on streaming services to fund local content have been put in place in France, Switzerland, Canada, Portugal and are coming into force in Spain, and they’re being discussed in Australia, no government has used the funds raised from digital service taxes to directly support journalism.
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[6 March 2024] X, formerly known as Twitter, experienced a 30% drop in usage from 2023 to 2024, according to a study from Edison Research that clashes with favorable traffic metrics shared by the social media platform’s billionaire owner, Elon Musk, and CEO Linda Yaccarino.
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[31 August 2024] X, formerly Twitter, has been banned in Brazil after failing to meet a deadline set by a Supreme Court judge to name a new legal representative in the country.
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[10 Feb 2013] Willie Sutton? Paul Perritt? Robert M. Yoder? Fred Curran? Apocryphal?
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Thank you, Media Freedom Citizenry
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CONVERSATION TOPICS: Paul McElwee, Peter Sandilands, and one person who chooses to remain anonymous.
THREE TRIGGER WORDS: Paris Lord, Paul Williams, and Peter Lieverdink.
ONE TRIGGER WORD: Andrew Kennedy, Ben G, Benno Rice, Bernard Walsh, Bic Smith, David Heath, Frank Filippone, Gavin Costello, Jamie Morrison, Julia DB, Mark Newton, Michael, Michael Cowley, Miriam Faye, Nicole Coombe, Oliver Townshend, Peter Blakeley, Peter Blakeley again, Regina Huntington, Ric Hayman, and two people who choose to remain anonymous.
PERSONALISED VIDEO MESSAGE: Gordon Kerry and Lucas James.
PERSONALISED AUDIO MESSAGE: Kimberley Heitman and one person who chooses to remain anonymous.
FOOT SOLDIERS FOR MEDIA FREEDOM who gave a SLIGHTLY LESS BASIC TIP: Brenton Realph, Brenton Realph again, Charles Gutjahr, Errol Cavit, Garth Kidd, James Henstridge, Matthew Crawford, Peter McCrudden, Rohan, and Tim Bell.
MEDIA FREEDOM CITIZENS who contributed a BASIC TIP: Mijanou Zigane and one person who chooses to remain anonymous,
And another eight people chose to have no reward, even though some of them were the most generous of all. Thank you all so much.
Series Credits
- The 9pm Edict theme by mansardian via The Freesound Project.
- Edict fanfare by neonaeon, via The Freesound Project.
- Elephant Stamp theme by Joshua Mehlman.